Balancing the Formal and the Informal (Reflection #2)

I feel that the reading didn't delve into how to regulate use social media. I don't think it went beyond stating that it is very useful and it seems to me that using it effectively is complex. What I wonder about the most is how companies trying to use social media balance the informality of the medium and the formality of being a professional organization. A big reason for the popularity of social media is its democratizing effect, where the relationship between entities becomes more familiar and consequently less formal (or possibly it's the other way around).

However, large organizations such as the New York Times or even Twitter must appear professional so as to avoid alienating segments of their audience. By doing so, they may be less appealing to some but at least they are not driving others away. For example, and similar to Lesley's point, Tweeters such as Shaq can harness informality in part by taking grammatical liberties but organizations like the Peace Corps or Starbucks cannot. Of course, organizations are also inhibited by the need to stay on-message.

I think news organizations have the easiest time with this because they can simply tweet recently released stories and employ bloggers to write more opinions. The New York Times, for instance, tweets only news stories while having some of its better-known journalists maintain Twitter feeds. The latter is a way of providing breaking news and allowing people to follow specific journalists who interest them, i.e. Nicholas Kristof, and the former creates a place for the loyal reader to find a simple and organized list of the latest pieces to read. The NY Times also employs people who write only online pieces (or people who write both online and print pieces), so that their opinion section is more substantive, easier to lose yourself in, and generally more engaging.

It gets more complicated with companies like Dell, which primarily engage with consumers through product sales rather than something like writing, which is inherently more personal. While there was still an opportunity to benefit from the "groundswell," while Dell realized, as the authors point out, that "authenticity was crucial," (pg. 211), the organization still felt a need to "delete [comments] that were considered inappropriate" (pg. 204). This top-down regulation presents the risk of negatively impacting authenticity, especially in an environment where managers "aren't used to sharing at that level [of transparency]" (pg. 209). One might worry, for example, that his/her company will miss its "flaming laptop" moment for fear of over-exposure or filter a comment like Jeff Jarvis's for offensive language.

I know that companies have a need for formality but I would have liked for the authors to delve deeper into effective ways of dealing with such issues. For example: what rules might a company put in place to regulate comments and commentary so as to filter useless and/or offensive opinions without missing a "flaming laptop" or "Dell hell moment?" Such questions seem to me to me to be present but never answered in the chapter.